The Descendants: Paradise Lost

Clooney and Co. Offer a Gritty Look at Familial Devastation

            While George Clooney's most recent offering, The Descendants, may be set in Hawaii, the tone of the film offers anything but a glimpse of paradise. Though the camera pans regularly over the beautiful hills and beaches of a 25,000-acre lot of land on Kauai, the heart of this dramedy centers on a moderately dysfunctional family shaken first by a paralyzing accident and then by an equally paralyzing revelation.

            Directed by Alexander Payne, who wrote and directed the Academy-award winning Sideways, The Descendants offers, like the aforementioned comedy about two oenophiles on a week-long trek through the Santa Barbara Wine Country, a gripping portrait of a man on the brink of collapse, living in a constant state of uncertainty and flux, who keeps it together simply because he must, because he has no alternative. Matt King (Clooney) is a Hawaiian real-estate attorney forced into the prickly role of taking care of his two daughters after a boating accident sends his wife Elizabeth into a coma. King is self-described as ‘the back up parent, the understudy,’ overtly spelling out his ineptitude as a caretaker. His life is further shaken when his doctor tells him Elizabeth will never wake up from the coma and he should get her affairs in order. To add more fuel to the fire, his daughter Alexandra alerts him that Elizabeth had been cheating on him at the time of her accident. It’s a series of shockingly disastrous events for a man living in a purported paradise.

            What follows is a glimpse into a family trying to deal with the sudden upheaval of having their mother and wife exposed as a fraud, trying to cling to some understanding after the initial jolt of a loved one turning out to have been a stranger. Though Elizabeth might have had a strained relationship with her two daughters, the rebellious Alexandra and ten year-old Scottie, and found herself growing continually distant from a husband she claimed was “out of touch with his emotions,” the far-reaching effect of her actions could not have been anticipated. One of the most powerful scenes in the film occurs when Alexandra tells King about the affair. Watching Clooney squirm for a grasp on the situation, mouth clenching and then loosening as his mind spins rapidly, offers a transfixing look at a husband receiving the ultimate blow sans preparation. It becomes clear quite early on in the film that the only paradise The Descendants offers is in its soundtrack, which uses exclusively Hawaiian music to set a breezy, autumnal tone that nicely contradicts with the grief and despair overwhelming the screen.

            There are moments of poignancy and tenderness even in the most emotionally devastating circumstances; the scene in which Elizabeth first hears and reacts to her mother’s fate is a memorable sliver of particularly moving underwater cinema (though I’m hard-pressed to thing of other significant examples, save for Dustin Hoffman in the diver suit in The Graduate). Hearing King’s cantankerous father-in-law (Robert Forster) berate King as he surveys his comatose daughter, declaring she deserved better than the husband she ended up with, that ‘she was a strong, faithful woman,’ and then watching Clooney’s face contort as he visibly struggles to refrain from debunking and shattering his father-in-law’s perception of his daughter’s fidelity makes for especially painful, honest cinema. The film’s true value is in its realism, in the utterly convincing nature of its scenes. Not once throughout the film is the story’s legitimacy brought into question. At times it feels like the viewer is sitting in on a King family therapy session, seeing the characters for the people that they in actuality are, with all of the fear, rage, dishonesty, and dissatisfaction that makes them human.

            The cast is stellar and tight knit, especially the three nuclear members of the King family. And then there are the wider circles of family members, whose adulation of King is brought into question as he falters in his commitment to sell the 25,000 acres of inheritance for an exorbitant amount that would render them all millionaires. The film has understandably generated significant Oscar-buzz, of which Clooney said at the November 15 Hollywood premiere of the film: ‘I’ve been the front-runner a couple of times and have lost. So I don’t ever listen…’ Clooney better perk up his ears; this one’s a winner.